In the field of this invention it is known that in a 3GPP system the PHYSICAL SHARED CHANNEL ALLOCATION message is used to allocate shared channel physical resources to different units of user equipment (UE) in both uplink and downlink.
A single set of physical resources are defined along with a transport format combination set ID (TFCS ID). The TFCS ID defines a number of transport format combinations (TFC) which are allowed on a coded composite transport channel.
In this way a single coded composite transport channel (CCTrCh) can be allocated using the PHYSICAL SHARED CHANNEL ALLOCATION message.
The PHYSICAL SHARED CHANNEL ALLOCATION message can define separately physical resources and TFCS IDs for both uplink and downlink.
However, this approach has the disadvantage that only a single coded composite transport channel can be allocated (in uplink and downlink) by a single PHYSICAL SHARED CHANNEL ALLOCATION message. This can give rise to either:                1. a large number of PHYSICAL SHARED CHANNEL ALLOCATION messages and consequently significant latency when a large portion of the physical resources is allocated to different users from frame to frame, which is likely to be the case when large proportions of the entire physical resource is set aside to shared channels and packet data applications are used.        2. Very large numbers of transport format combinations having to be signalled which encompass multiple timeslots.        
A need therefore exists for a mechanism to permit multiple cctrch allocations from a single physical shared channel allocation message wherein the abovementioned disadvantages may be alleviated.